Cramer: In Spam We Trust

It was another wild roller-coaster day on Wall Street but in the end, optimism prevailed. Stocks struggled to end mixed, with the Dow Jones recovering from a 190-point loss to close down 6 points at 12,496, the Nasdaq up 0.4 percent to close at 2,850 and the S&P 500 ending the day up just a fraction at 1,318.

Investors looking to weather the financial storm should turn to solid staple grocery stocks, Jim Cramer said Wednesday on CNBC's "Mad Money." And right now, he said, there's no better name out there than Hormel Foods, the multinational maker of meat and food products like Spam. Less than a dollar off its 52-week high, Hormel also boasts some key strengths that Cramer said were worth noting.

“We should always be trying to capture some of the upside when the market rallies,” he said. “We need stocks in our portfolio that can work regardless of what happens in Europe.”

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Hormel, which reported a dynamite quarter on Tuesday, is the perfect example of a non-discretionary stock that will always come through in the face of turmoil. That is why the company withstood the infamous U.S. Panic of 1983. Hormel is also special because unlike with JPMorgan Chase and other behemoth banks, investors know exactly how the firm makes its money.

“JPMorgan’s unfathomable,” he said. “The worst you can say about Spam is that it’s inedible.”

Despite what some may think, Hormel also reigns supreme as the “king of food innovation” with not only Spam, but also its breakthrough turkey product, Jennie O-Turkey.

“That’s the kind of innovation that’s both hard to top and easy to understand,” Cramer said, adding Hormel also benefits from the ongoing commodity crash and a “long runway of international growth” that isn’t tied to Western Europe.

The bottom line: Hormel may not be your cup of tea, but it stands firm as a company that will get investors through this rough patch, that has domestic security, that profits from falling commodities prices and that pays a nice dividend, Cramer said.